NYT review of our next book send in by Jack Thompson
By JENNIFER SCHUESSLERPublished: July 22, 2008
“The Dark Side,” Jane Mayer’s gripping new account of the war on terror, is really the story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic radicalism, and the bitter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether the president should have limitless power to wage it. The euphemistically named but often grisly particulars of the fight against Al Qaeda — the “extraordinary renditions” by hooded agents in unmarked planes, the secret “black site” prisons across the globe, the “enhanced” interrogation techniques, the “reverse rendition” of detainees lucky enough to be found innocent and dumped blindfolded at remote borders — are harrowingly recounted here, complete with fresh revelations. But in Ms. Mayer’s hands the story of bureaucratic jockeying in well-upholstered offices and in the fine print of legal documents makes for an equally absorbing and disturbing story. It’s a cage match between the Constitution and a cabal of ideological extremists, and the Constitution goes down.
Jane Mayer, New York Times
The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was a “political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war” waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11. Ms. Mayer’s prime movers and main villains are Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish “a policy of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10.”
As the leader of the self-styled “war council,” a group of lawyers who took the lead in making the rules for the war on terror, Mr. Addington startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of his power. “How did this lunatic end up running the country?” an unnamed “high ranking and very conservative” administration lawyer quoted by Ms. Mayer recalls asking himself in meetings. “Even his admirers,” Ms. Mayer writes, “tended to invoke metaphors involving knives.” “Cheney’s Cheney” was known to carry a dog-eared copy of the Constitution in his pocket — a detail that in another story might suggest a steadfast devotion but in Ms. Mayer’s comes off as just a way of breaking it down before swallowing it whole.
The original copy of the Geneva Conventions rests in the vaults of the State Department, but Ms. Mayer describes how Mr. Cheney, Mr. Addington and their allies made sure this was less a place of honor than an oubliette. The war council settled on a “pre-emptive criminal model,” in which suspects would be used — more or less indefinitely — to gather evidence of future crimes rather than held accountable for previous ones. There would be minimal oversight from Congress. The C.I.A. would take the lead, developing aggressive new interrogation methods that would be described as “enhanced,” “robust,” “special.” What they were not, a series of secret memos issued by John Yoo and others at the Office of Legal Council would attempt to certify, was “torture.”
Ms. Mayer pieces together detailed case histories for several prisoners, beginning with “detainee 001,” the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, whose botched prosecution led the administration to decide, in Ms. Mayer’s words, that “open criminal trials under the strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk.” But even as such trials were largely abandoned, evidence gathering was stepped up, using increasingly exotic means.
SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) was a program developed by the military to train soldiers to resist torture or other rough treatment if captured. After 9/11, as Ms. Mayer first reported in The New Yorker, it was “reverse-engineered” into an offensive weapon. Under the influence of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist hired to supervise the project despite his lack of experience with either interrogations or Islamic extremism, the black sites, Guantánamo and eventually Abu Ghraib became a bizarro world where detainees were kept on dog leashes, subjected to “invasion of space by female” and bombarded with intolerable sounds, including “meows from cat-food commercials, Yoko Ono singing and Eminem rapping about America.” Prisoners were sometimes held in tiny coffinlike boxes or forced to stand until overcome by the “self-inflicted pain.”
The elaborately plotted interrogations — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was subjected to “hundreds of different techniques in just a two-week period soon after his capture" in 2003 — were authorized and tracked at the highest levels, with officials in Washington, including George Tenet, at the time the director of the C.I.A., approving any deviations from the “treatment” plans in what one source calls “top-down quality control” and Ms. Mayer calls a twisted version of Mother, May I? A secret Red Cross report given to the C.I.A. last year and described to Ms. Mayer said some of these techniques were categorically torture. (An internal C.I.A. review, she writes, was on its way to reaching the same conclusion in 2004 before Mr. Cheney derailed it.) While waterboarding has drawn the most public criticism, a former government official familiar with the program told Ms. Mayer, the real brutality lay in the sheer number and duration of the different “procedures.” “The totality is just staggering,” this official said.
The early months of the rendition program, a C.I.A. officer told Ms. Mayer, was the “Camelot of counterterrorism,” with volunteers turned away. But as the harsh interrogations became “routinized,” second thoughts — and fear of legal exposure — began to mount. As the C.I.A. officer put it, “Do you really want to be building these skill sets?”
Meanwhile some in Washington were having doubts as well. In the last third of the book Ms. Mayer shifts focus to the heroes of her story, the government lawyers — often hard-line conservatives — who tried to fight back against a program whose existence and scope they only belatedly grasped. There is a particularly fine chapter on Alberto Mora, then the general counsel of the Navy, who in early 2003 mounted a futile challenge to the interrogation policy, which he feared might result in war crimes charges. Mr. Mora reportedly warned Donald Rumsfeld’s chief counsel, William J. Haynes, to “protect your client!” Mr. Haynes did — by getting another secret opinion from Mr. Yoo, superseding Mr. Mora’s. (Ms. Mayer suggests the opinion may have been hammered out during a friendly racquetball match.)
Ms. Mayer also gives a gripping account of the now well-known standoff between Mr. Addington and Jack Goldsmith, who after being named head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 moved to revoke Mr. Yoo’s memos. (One of Mr. Goldsmith’s successors, Steven G. Bradbury, issued another secret memo, reinstating much of their substance.) And she recounts how another group of administration lawyers met in secret in June 2005 to formulate “the Big Bang,” a plan to shut down the black sites and bring the interrogations in line with international law by doing an end run around Mr. Cheney and going straight to President Bush, whom they believed to be sympathetic.
In reality, Ms. Mayer writes, “there is no record that Bush ever objected to the methods employed by the C.I.A. in its black sites or insisted on any outside review of the C.I.A.’s claims that their approach was working.” She vigorously argues that the approach did not work, and in fact did tremendous damage to national security by unleashing a flood of false and even dangerously misleading intelligence, including some used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
“What does that mean? ‘Outrages upon human dignity’?” President Bush said at a press conference in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions applied even to “enemy combatants.” In “The Dark Side” Ms. Mayer provides a chilling answer, along with the most vivid and comprehensive account we have had so far of how a government founded on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been turned against those ideals.
Algeria: torture last time
From Germany to France to America--the heritage of civilization from Jack Thompson
Feature by Ian Birchall, February 2008 When Algerian journalist Henri Alleg published his account of being tortured at the hands of the French colonial regime it became an instant bestseller. Ian Birchall tells us why the book is still as relevant today as it was 50 years ago during the Algerian War of Independence.
More than 50 years ago France was fighting a vicious colonial war in Algeria. The enemy were so-called "terrorists", North African Muslims who wanted national independence. Many episodes from that war have striking parallels with the world today.
Henri Alleg was editor of Alger Républicain, the only daily newspaper in Algeria to oppose the French colonial regime, and a member of the Algerian Communist Party. In 1955 Alger Républicain was banned and the following year it was decided to intern most of its contributors. Alleg went into hiding.
In June 1957 he was arrested by paratroops who kept him, without trial, in a building in the El-Biar district of Algiers for a whole month, while he was repeatedly tortured. Electric shocks were administered to his ears, hands and genitals. A rubber tube was attached to a tap and running water was forced into his mouth until he felt he was drowning; he was repeatedly punched in the stomach (with a few refinements this is what is nowadays known as "waterboarding"). Burning paper was applied to his legs, penis and nipples. He was deprived of water when thirsty and then taunted with a glass of water which he was not allowed to drink. He was forcibly injected with a so-called "truth drug". He was told that his wife would be brought in and tortured too. The paratroops boasted that they were the "Gestapo". Alleg resisted and did not betray his comrades.
Torture had been illegal in France since the 1789 French Revolution. But it was being used widely, mainly against Muslim prisoners from the National Liberation Front (FLN). Most of these were eventually killed, allegedly while trying to escape, as was Alleg's friend, the mathematician Maurice Audin (Audin's body has never been found). Over 3,000 people simply "disappeared" without trace.
Alleg expected to die. But the courageous efforts of his wife, despite persecution by paratroops, produced a press campaign which meant his case could not be covered up. He was moved to a civil prison. At no time was he accused of involvement in violence or terrorism. The charges against him were the extremely vague ones of "endangering national security" and "reconstituting a banned organisation" (the Algerian Communist Party).
Despite constant searches in the prison, Alleg wrote an account of his experiences. Successive sections were clandestinely passed under the table to his defence lawyers and smuggled out of the prison. Alleg remained in jail for three years until he succeeded in escaping. In February 1958 his account was published as a short book called The Question (in French "la question" means both question and torture). Fittingly, it was published by the Éditions de Minuit, originally a clandestine publishing house under the Nazi occupation.
Stark and simple
The book related Alleg's experiences in a stark, simple manner. The circumstances of its writing did not allow for literary decoration. It was an instant bestseller. Doubtless the shock it caused was partly because Alleg was white, of European descent. Most victims of torture were Muslims. But Alleg's story gave a voice to them all. The first edition of 20,000 copies sold out rapidly - some bookshops were selling over 50 copies a day. Within a fortnight 60,000 copies were sold. Then the book was confiscated by the police, the first time this had been done for political reasons in France since the 18th century. Even in the days before the internet, censorship was not easy to impose. A Swiss publisher produced a new edition within a month, and copies were smuggled into France. An English translation was issued by the publisher John Calder.
In March the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an article for the left wing weekly L'Express about the book. Within hours the police went round the newsstands and seized every copy. A pamphlet version was also seized and destroyed. But again the censorship was flouted. The satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné printed a reduced photograph of the article with large crosses through it; this could be read easily with a magnifying glass, and it is said there was a great increase in sales of magnifying glasses that week. The government did not seize Le Canard.
Sartre was a world-renowned philosopher, novelist and playwright - a few years later he refused the Nobel Prize. His philosophical writings are often obscure, but when he wrote about politics he displayed devastating clarity. His article, "A Victory", remains a crushing indictment of colonialism and torture.
He began by recalling that less than 15 years earlier torture had been widely practised on French soil - then it was the Nazis who were torturing French resisters. Now the French were taking on the role of torturers - who could have believed, in the days of the occupation, that one day "men would be made to scream in our name"? The comparison was apt - but outrageous. In 1950s France a Resistance record was an essential precondition for a political career. To compare French paratroops to Nazis was little short of blasphemy.
The aim of torture, he wrote, was "to convince us of our impotence". He derided the argument, still produced today by apologists for torture, that it was necessary to save lives. Nobody even claimed that Alleg had been involved in terrorism; all his torturers wanted was the address of the comrade who had given him accommodation.
As he showed, the target of torture was not organised terrorists, but the Muslim population in general. "People are arrested at random; all Muslims can be tortured whenever the authorities feel like it. The majority of those tortured say nothing because they have nothing to say, unless they agree, in order to stop suffering, to tell lies or confess voluntarily to an unsolved crime which it is convenient to accuse them of." For Sartre torture was not an atrocity that could be blamed on a particular set of brutal individuals; it was inherent in the whole logic of colonial warfare, just as "terrorism" was the only option available to the weaker side:
"In Algeria our army is deployed right across the territory; we have the advantage of numbers, money and weapons. The insurgents have nothing but the trust and the support of a large part of the population. Despite ourselves, we have defined the main features of this people's war: bombings and shootings in the towns, ambushes in the countryside. The FLN didn't choose these forms of action; it is simply doing what is possible for it. The balance of forces between them and us obliges them to attack by surprise; invisible, uncatchable, unexpected, they have to strike and disappear, or else they will be exterminated.
"This is the difficulty for us: we are fighting a clandestine enemy. A hand throws a bomb in the street; a shot wounds one of our soldiers on the road. Our troops rush up, but there's nobody there. Later, in the surrounding area, they will find Muslims who have seen nothing. Everything is linked; a people's war, a war of the poor against the rich, is characterised by the close link between the rebel units and the population. As a result, for the regular army and the civil authorities, the whole throng of the wretched become the permanent, uncountable enemy.
"The occupation forces are disturbed by a silence that they themselves have given rise to; they sense an elusive determination to remain silent, a secret that is everywhere but can never be pinned down. The rich feel hunted down amid the silent poor; embarrassed by their own strength, the 'forces of order' have no means of answering the guerrillas except reprisals and searches. They have no answer to terrorism except terror. Something is hidden, everywhere and by everyone: they must be made to speak."
The French claimed they were in Algeria in pursuit of a "civilising mission". In fact they had destroyed the pre-colonial civilisation, but kept their own civilisation closed to the Muslims. Algerians were demanding independence because they had been refused integration; they could not be given equal rights, for that would threaten the very foundations of colonial exploitation. So, Sartre concluded, the war could not be "humanised"; torture was an inextricable part of it. The only solution was to open negotiations and end the war.
Algeria won its independence in 1962. But most of the torturers went unpunished. Some helped to train US troops in the art of torture for use in Vietnam or sold their services to Latin American dictators.
In France today many realise that the problems of racism can be confronted only through an understanding of history. A recent play based on Alleg's book attracted an enthusiastic audience of young people not born at the time of the war. Alleg himself, now in his 80s, remains true to his Communist principles. In a recent interview he was asked about the continuing relevance of his book. He replied:
"It is quite possible that new conflicts will arise - there are already many of them - where young French people will be called upon to intervene to 'fight terrorism', 'save democracy' and 'defend freedom', when the real reason for intervention will be to exploit deposits of oil, gas, ore and diamonds, and to prevent certain peoples from liberating themselves."
I first read extracts from Sartre's article in the Observer in 1958, back in the days when it was a serious newspaper. A little later I read Alleg's book and, like most people reading about torture, I wondered how I should face up to it. Happily I've never had to find out.
But when I reread these texts today, the truly shocking thing is just how little has changed. The torture and Islamophobia of the Algerian war have recurred again and again and again. Torture lies at the very heart of imperialism, and will only perish when the whole rotten system is destroyed.
Henri Alleg's The Question, together with Sartre's article, is published by the University of Nebraska Press. For a selection of Sartre's political writings, including the splendid preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, but unfortunately not "A Victory", see the Marxists Internet Archive ||
C.I.A. Document Details Destruction of Tapes
All of this goes to the heart of our next book, making it surprisingly contemporary. Cheers, jak
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 15, 2010
WASHINGTON — Porter J. Goss, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2005 approved of the decision by one of his top aides to destroy dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two detainees, according to an internal C.I.A. document released Thursday.
Andrew Councill for The New York Times
Porter J. Goss, shown in May 2006, joked with Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, after the latter offered to “take the heat” for destroying tapes that documented brutal interrogation of detainees, agency documents show.
Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he “agreed” with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to “take the heat” for destroying the tapes.
“PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat,” according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.
According to current and former intelligence officials, Mr. Goss did not approve the destruction before it happened, and was displeased that Mr. Rodriguez did not consult him or the C.I.A.’s top lawyer before giving the order for the tapes to be destroyed.
It was previously known that Mr. Goss had been told by his aides in November 2005 that the tapes had been destroyed. But a number of documents released Thursday provide the most detailed glimpse yet of the deliberations inside the C.I.A. surrounding the destroyed tapes, and of the concern among officials at the spy agency that the decision might put the C.I.A. in legal jeopardy.
The documents detailing those deliberations, including two e-mail messages from a C.I.A. official whose name has been excised, were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The e-mail messages also reveal that top White House officials were angry that the C.I.A. had not notified them before the tapes were destroyed. The e-mail messages mention a conversation between Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, and John A. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, in which Ms. Miers was “livid” about being told after the fact.
“Rizzo is clearly upset, because he was on the hook to notify Harriet Miers of the status of the tapes because it was she who had asked to be advised before any action was taken,” according to one of the e-mail messages.
In 2002, C.I.A. operatives in Thailand videotaped the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects whom the C.I.A. was holding in secret in that country. More than a hundred tapes were made, and many were kept in a safe in the C.I.A. station in Bangkok. According to former C.I.A. officials, Mr. Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed in November 2005 because he feared that if the tapes were to become public it would put undercover C.I.A. officers in legal and physical jeopardy.
According to one of the e-mail messages released Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez told Mr. Goss that the tapes, taken out of context, would make the C.I.A. “look terrible; it would be devastating to us.”
The destruction of the tapes is the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation that has stretched on for more than two years. The investigation is led by John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut.
Mr. Goss and other former C.I.A. officers have testified before a grand jury hearing evidence as part of the investigation, former intelligence officials said.
A spokesman for Mr. Goss declined to comment on Thursday evening.
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: “For more than two years, a Department of Justice prosecutor has been looking into the matter. The agency has cooperated fully with that inquiry and will, of course, continue to do so. We hope that this issue is resolved soon.”
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Rizzo said he was not at the meeting recounted in the e-mail messages, but said “Porter never once indicated to me that he agreed with the decision.”
“I thought he was as upset as I was for not being told,” he said.
Mr. Rizzo said that White House officials agreed with him that destroying the tapes was a bad idea, and that they expected to be informed before the C.I.A. made any decisions about their fate.
“They said don’t do anything without telling them in advance,” he said.
One American official familiar with the matter cautioned that the e-mail messages were merely the account of one unnamed C.I.A. official, not the results of a formal investigation.
“It’s a little risky to draw cosmic conclusions from something like that,” he said.
The destruction of the interrogation tapes was first revealed by The New York Times in December 2007.
Table of Contents
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A History of Abuse in the War on Terror
NYT review of our next book send in by Jack ThompsonBy JENNIFER SCHUESSLERPublished: July 22, 2008
“The Dark Side,” Jane Mayer’s gripping new account of the war on terror, is really the story of two wars: the far-flung battle against Islamic radicalism, and the bitter, closed-doors domestic struggle over whether the president should have limitless power to wage it. The euphemistically named but often grisly particulars of the fight against Al Qaeda — the “extraordinary renditions” by hooded agents in unmarked planes, the secret “black site” prisons across the globe, the “enhanced” interrogation techniques, the “reverse rendition” of detainees lucky enough to be found innocent and dumped blindfolded at remote borders — are harrowingly recounted here, complete with fresh revelations. But in Ms. Mayer’s hands the story of bureaucratic jockeying in well-upholstered offices and in the fine print of legal documents makes for an equally absorbing and disturbing story. It’s a cage match between the Constitution and a cabal of ideological extremists, and the Constitution goes down.
The war on terror, according to Ms. Mayer, a staff writer at The New Yorker, was a “political battle cloaked in legal strategy, an ideological trench war” waged by a small group of true believers whose expansive views of executive power she traces from the Nixon administration through the Iran-contra scandal to the panicked days after 9/11. Ms. Mayer’s prime movers and main villains are Vice President Dick Cheney and his legal counsel (now chief of staff) David Addington, who after the terrorist attacks moved to establish “a policy of deliberate cruelty that would’ve been unthinkable on Sept. 10.”
As the leader of the self-styled “war council,” a group of lawyers who took the lead in making the rules for the war on terror, Mr. Addington startled many colleagues with the depth of his fervor and the reach of his power. “How did this lunatic end up running the country?” an unnamed “high ranking and very conservative” administration lawyer quoted by Ms. Mayer recalls asking himself in meetings. “Even his admirers,” Ms. Mayer writes, “tended to invoke metaphors involving knives.” “Cheney’s Cheney” was known to carry a dog-eared copy of the Constitution in his pocket — a detail that in another story might suggest a steadfast devotion but in Ms. Mayer’s comes off as just a way of breaking it down before swallowing it whole.
The original copy of the Geneva Conventions rests in the vaults of the State Department, but Ms. Mayer describes how Mr. Cheney, Mr. Addington and their allies made sure this was less a place of honor than an oubliette. The war council settled on a “pre-emptive criminal model,” in which suspects would be used — more or less indefinitely — to gather evidence of future crimes rather than held accountable for previous ones. There would be minimal oversight from Congress. The C.I.A. would take the lead, developing aggressive new interrogation methods that would be described as “enhanced,” “robust,” “special.” What they were not, a series of secret memos issued by John Yoo and others at the Office of Legal Council would attempt to certify, was “torture.”
Ms. Mayer pieces together detailed case histories for several prisoners, beginning with “detainee 001,” the so-called American Taliban, John Walker Lindh, whose botched prosecution led the administration to decide, in Ms. Mayer’s words, that “open criminal trials under the strict rules of the American legal system were not worth the risk.” But even as such trials were largely abandoned, evidence gathering was stepped up, using increasingly exotic means.
SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape) was a program developed by the military to train soldiers to resist torture or other rough treatment if captured. After 9/11, as Ms. Mayer first reported in The New Yorker, it was “reverse-engineered” into an offensive weapon. Under the influence of James Mitchell, a former military psychologist hired to supervise the project despite his lack of experience with either interrogations or Islamic extremism, the black sites, Guantánamo and eventually Abu Ghraib became a bizarro world where detainees were kept on dog leashes, subjected to “invasion of space by female” and bombarded with intolerable sounds, including “meows from cat-food commercials, Yoko Ono singing and Eminem rapping about America.” Prisoners were sometimes held in tiny coffinlike boxes or forced to stand until overcome by the “self-inflicted pain.”
The elaborately plotted interrogations — Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, accused of being the mastermind of the 9/11 plot, was subjected to “hundreds of different techniques in just a two-week period soon after his capture" in 2003 — were authorized and tracked at the highest levels, with officials in Washington, including George Tenet, at the time the director of the C.I.A., approving any deviations from the “treatment” plans in what one source calls “top-down quality control” and Ms. Mayer calls a twisted version of Mother, May I? A secret Red Cross report given to the C.I.A. last year and described to Ms. Mayer said some of these techniques were categorically torture. (An internal C.I.A. review, she writes, was on its way to reaching the same conclusion in 2004 before Mr. Cheney derailed it.) While waterboarding has drawn the most public criticism, a former government official familiar with the program told Ms. Mayer, the real brutality lay in the sheer number and duration of the different “procedures.” “The totality is just staggering,” this official said.
The early months of the rendition program, a C.I.A. officer told Ms. Mayer, was the “Camelot of counterterrorism,” with volunteers turned away. But as the harsh interrogations became “routinized,” second thoughts — and fear of legal exposure — began to mount. As the C.I.A. officer put it, “Do you really want to be building these skill sets?”
Meanwhile some in Washington were having doubts as well. In the last third of the book Ms. Mayer shifts focus to the heroes of her story, the government lawyers — often hard-line conservatives — who tried to fight back against a program whose existence and scope they only belatedly grasped. There is a particularly fine chapter on Alberto Mora, then the general counsel of the Navy, who in early 2003 mounted a futile challenge to the interrogation policy, which he feared might result in war crimes charges. Mr. Mora reportedly warned Donald Rumsfeld’s chief counsel, William J. Haynes, to “protect your client!” Mr. Haynes did — by getting another secret opinion from Mr. Yoo, superseding Mr. Mora’s. (Ms. Mayer suggests the opinion may have been hammered out during a friendly racquetball match.)
Ms. Mayer also gives a gripping account of the now well-known standoff between Mr. Addington and Jack Goldsmith, who after being named head of the Office of Legal Counsel in 2003 moved to revoke Mr. Yoo’s memos. (One of Mr. Goldsmith’s successors, Steven G. Bradbury, issued another secret memo, reinstating much of their substance.) And she recounts how another group of administration lawyers met in secret in June 2005 to formulate “the Big Bang,” a plan to shut down the black sites and bring the interrogations in line with international law by doing an end run around Mr. Cheney and going straight to President Bush, whom they believed to be sympathetic.
In reality, Ms. Mayer writes, “there is no record that Bush ever objected to the methods employed by the C.I.A. in its black sites or insisted on any outside review of the C.I.A.’s claims that their approach was working.” She vigorously argues that the approach did not work, and in fact did tremendous damage to national security by unleashing a flood of false and even dangerously misleading intelligence, including some used to justify the invasion of Iraq.
“What does that mean? ‘Outrages upon human dignity’?” President Bush said at a press conference in 2006, after the Supreme Court ruled that the Geneva Conventions applied even to “enemy combatants.” In “The Dark Side” Ms. Mayer provides a chilling answer, along with the most vivid and comprehensive account we have had so far of how a government founded on checks and balances and respect for individual rights could have been turned against those ideals.
Algeria: torture last time
From Germany to France to America--the heritage of civilization from Jack Thompson
Feature by Ian Birchall, February 2008When Algerian journalist Henri Alleg published his account of being tortured at the hands of the French colonial regime it became an instant bestseller. Ian Birchall tells us why the book is still as relevant today as it was 50 years ago during the Algerian War of Independence.
More than 50 years ago France was fighting a vicious colonial war in Algeria. The enemy were so-called "terrorists", North African Muslims who wanted national independence. Many episodes from that war have striking parallels with the world today.
Henri Alleg was editor of Alger Républicain, the only daily newspaper in Algeria to oppose the French colonial regime, and a member of the Algerian Communist Party. In 1955 Alger Républicain was banned and the following year it was decided to intern most of its contributors. Alleg went into hiding.
In June 1957 he was arrested by paratroops who kept him, without trial, in a building in the El-Biar district of Algiers for a whole month, while he was repeatedly tortured. Electric shocks were administered to his ears, hands and genitals. A rubber tube was attached to a tap and running water was forced into his mouth until he felt he was drowning; he was repeatedly punched in the stomach (with a few refinements this is what is nowadays known as "waterboarding"). Burning paper was applied to his legs, penis and nipples. He was deprived of water when thirsty and then taunted with a glass of water which he was not allowed to drink. He was forcibly injected with a so-called "truth drug". He was told that his wife would be brought in and tortured too. The paratroops boasted that they were the "Gestapo". Alleg resisted and did not betray his comrades.
Torture had been illegal in France since the 1789 French Revolution. But it was being used widely, mainly against Muslim prisoners from the National Liberation Front (FLN). Most of these were eventually killed, allegedly while trying to escape, as was Alleg's friend, the mathematician Maurice Audin (Audin's body has never been found). Over 3,000 people simply "disappeared" without trace.
Alleg expected to die. But the courageous efforts of his wife, despite persecution by paratroops, produced a press campaign which meant his case could not be covered up. He was moved to a civil prison. At no time was he accused of involvement in violence or terrorism. The charges against him were the extremely vague ones of "endangering national security" and "reconstituting a banned organisation" (the Algerian Communist Party).
Despite constant searches in the prison, Alleg wrote an account of his experiences. Successive sections were clandestinely passed under the table to his defence lawyers and smuggled out of the prison. Alleg remained in jail for three years until he succeeded in escaping. In February 1958 his account was published as a short book called The Question (in French "la question" means both question and torture). Fittingly, it was published by the Éditions de Minuit, originally a clandestine publishing house under the Nazi occupation.
Stark and simple
The book related Alleg's experiences in a stark, simple manner. The circumstances of its writing did not allow for literary decoration. It was an instant bestseller. Doubtless the shock it caused was partly because Alleg was white, of European descent. Most victims of torture were Muslims. But Alleg's story gave a voice to them all. The first edition of 20,000 copies sold out rapidly - some bookshops were selling over 50 copies a day. Within a fortnight 60,000 copies were sold. Then the book was confiscated by the police, the first time this had been done for political reasons in France since the 18th century. Even in the days before the internet, censorship was not easy to impose. A Swiss publisher produced a new edition within a month, and copies were smuggled into France. An English translation was issued by the publisher John Calder.
In March the philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre wrote an article for the left wing weekly L'Express about the book. Within hours the police went round the newsstands and seized every copy. A pamphlet version was also seized and destroyed. But again the censorship was flouted. The satirical magazine Le Canard Enchaîné printed a reduced photograph of the article with large crosses through it; this could be read easily with a magnifying glass, and it is said there was a great increase in sales of magnifying glasses that week. The government did not seize Le Canard.
Sartre was a world-renowned philosopher, novelist and playwright - a few years later he refused the Nobel Prize. His philosophical writings are often obscure, but when he wrote about politics he displayed devastating clarity. His article, "A Victory", remains a crushing indictment of colonialism and torture.
He began by recalling that less than 15 years earlier torture had been widely practised on French soil - then it was the Nazis who were torturing French resisters. Now the French were taking on the role of torturers - who could have believed, in the days of the occupation, that one day "men would be made to scream in our name"? The comparison was apt - but outrageous. In 1950s France a Resistance record was an essential precondition for a political career. To compare French paratroops to Nazis was little short of blasphemy.
The aim of torture, he wrote, was "to convince us of our impotence". He derided the argument, still produced today by apologists for torture, that it was necessary to save lives. Nobody even claimed that Alleg had been involved in terrorism; all his torturers wanted was the address of the comrade who had given him accommodation.
As he showed, the target of torture was not organised terrorists, but the Muslim population in general. "People are arrested at random; all Muslims can be tortured whenever the authorities feel like it. The majority of those tortured say nothing because they have nothing to say, unless they agree, in order to stop suffering, to tell lies or confess voluntarily to an unsolved crime which it is convenient to accuse them of." For Sartre torture was not an atrocity that could be blamed on a particular set of brutal individuals; it was inherent in the whole logic of colonial warfare, just as "terrorism" was the only option available to the weaker side:
"In Algeria our army is deployed right across the territory; we have the advantage of numbers, money and weapons. The insurgents have nothing but the trust and the support of a large part of the population. Despite ourselves, we have defined the main features of this people's war: bombings and shootings in the towns, ambushes in the countryside. The FLN didn't choose these forms of action; it is simply doing what is possible for it. The balance of forces between them and us obliges them to attack by surprise; invisible, uncatchable, unexpected, they have to strike and disappear, or else they will be exterminated.
"This is the difficulty for us: we are fighting a clandestine enemy. A hand throws a bomb in the street; a shot wounds one of our soldiers on the road. Our troops rush up, but there's nobody there. Later, in the surrounding area, they will find Muslims who have seen nothing. Everything is linked; a people's war, a war of the poor against the rich, is characterised by the close link between the rebel units and the population. As a result, for the regular army and the civil authorities, the whole throng of the wretched become the permanent, uncountable enemy.
"The occupation forces are disturbed by a silence that they themselves have given rise to; they sense an elusive determination to remain silent, a secret that is everywhere but can never be pinned down. The rich feel hunted down amid the silent poor; embarrassed by their own strength, the 'forces of order' have no means of answering the guerrillas except reprisals and searches. They have no answer to terrorism except terror. Something is hidden, everywhere and by everyone: they must be made to speak."
The French claimed they were in Algeria in pursuit of a "civilising mission". In fact they had destroyed the pre-colonial civilisation, but kept their own civilisation closed to the Muslims. Algerians were demanding independence because they had been refused integration; they could not be given equal rights, for that would threaten the very foundations of colonial exploitation. So, Sartre concluded, the war could not be "humanised"; torture was an inextricable part of it. The only solution was to open negotiations and end the war.
Algeria won its independence in 1962. But most of the torturers went unpunished. Some helped to train US troops in the art of torture for use in Vietnam or sold their services to Latin American dictators.
In France today many realise that the problems of racism can be confronted only through an understanding of history. A recent play based on Alleg's book attracted an enthusiastic audience of young people not born at the time of the war. Alleg himself, now in his 80s, remains true to his Communist principles. In a recent interview he was asked about the continuing relevance of his book. He replied:
"It is quite possible that new conflicts will arise - there are already many of them - where young French people will be called upon to intervene to 'fight terrorism', 'save democracy' and 'defend freedom', when the real reason for intervention will be to exploit deposits of oil, gas, ore and diamonds, and to prevent certain peoples from liberating themselves."
I first read extracts from Sartre's article in the Observer in 1958, back in the days when it was a serious newspaper. A little later I read Alleg's book and, like most people reading about torture, I wondered how I should face up to it. Happily I've never had to find out.
But when I reread these texts today, the truly shocking thing is just how little has changed. The torture and Islamophobia of the Algerian war have recurred again and again and again. Torture lies at the very heart of imperialism, and will only perish when the whole rotten system is destroyed.
Henri Alleg's The Question, together with Sartre's article, is published by the University of Nebraska Press. For a selection of Sartre's political writings, including the splendid preface to Frantz Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth, but unfortunately not "A Victory", see the Marxists Internet Archive ||
C.I.A. Document Details Destruction of Tapes
All of this goes to the heart of our next book, making it surprisingly contemporary. Cheers, jak
By MARK MAZZETTI
Published: April 15, 2010
WASHINGTON — Porter J. Goss, the former director of the Central Intelligence Agency, in 2005 approved of the decision by one of his top aides to destroy dozens of videotapes documenting the brutal interrogation of two detainees, according to an internal C.I.A. document released Thursday.
Andrew Councill for The New York Times
Porter J. Goss, shown in May 2006, joked with Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., the former head of the C.I.A.'s clandestine service, after the latter offered to “take the heat” for destroying tapes that documented brutal interrogation of detainees, agency documents show.
- Times Topics: C.I.A. Interrogation Tapes | C.I.A. Interrogations
Shortly after the tapes were destroyed at the order of Jose A. Rodriguez Jr., then the head of the C.I.A.’s clandestine service, Mr. Goss told Mr. Rodriguez that he “agreed” with the decision, according to the document. He even joked after Mr. Rodriguez offered to “take the heat” for destroying the tapes.“PG laughed and said that actually, it would be he, PG, who would take the heat,” according to one document, an internal C.I.A. e-mail message.
According to current and former intelligence officials, Mr. Goss did not approve the destruction before it happened, and was displeased that Mr. Rodriguez did not consult him or the C.I.A.’s top lawyer before giving the order for the tapes to be destroyed.
It was previously known that Mr. Goss had been told by his aides in November 2005 that the tapes had been destroyed. But a number of documents released Thursday provide the most detailed glimpse yet of the deliberations inside the C.I.A. surrounding the destroyed tapes, and of the concern among officials at the spy agency that the decision might put the C.I.A. in legal jeopardy.
The documents detailing those deliberations, including two e-mail messages from a C.I.A. official whose name has been excised, were released as part of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The e-mail messages also reveal that top White House officials were angry that the C.I.A. had not notified them before the tapes were destroyed. The e-mail messages mention a conversation between Harriet E. Miers, the White House counsel, and John A. Rizzo, the C.I.A.’s top lawyer, in which Ms. Miers was “livid” about being told after the fact.
“Rizzo is clearly upset, because he was on the hook to notify Harriet Miers of the status of the tapes because it was she who had asked to be advised before any action was taken,” according to one of the e-mail messages.
In 2002, C.I.A. operatives in Thailand videotaped the interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, two Qaeda suspects whom the C.I.A. was holding in secret in that country. More than a hundred tapes were made, and many were kept in a safe in the C.I.A. station in Bangkok. According to former C.I.A. officials, Mr. Rodriguez ordered the tapes destroyed in November 2005 because he feared that if the tapes were to become public it would put undercover C.I.A. officers in legal and physical jeopardy.
According to one of the e-mail messages released Thursday, Mr. Rodriguez told Mr. Goss that the tapes, taken out of context, would make the C.I.A. “look terrible; it would be devastating to us.”
The destruction of the tapes is the subject of a Justice Department criminal investigation that has stretched on for more than two years. The investigation is led by John Durham, a federal prosecutor in Connecticut.
Mr. Goss and other former C.I.A. officers have testified before a grand jury hearing evidence as part of the investigation, former intelligence officials said.
A spokesman for Mr. Goss declined to comment on Thursday evening.
Paul Gimigliano, a C.I.A. spokesman, said: “For more than two years, a Department of Justice prosecutor has been looking into the matter. The agency has cooperated fully with that inquiry and will, of course, continue to do so. We hope that this issue is resolved soon.”
In a telephone interview on Thursday, Mr. Rizzo said he was not at the meeting recounted in the e-mail messages, but said “Porter never once indicated to me that he agreed with the decision.”
“I thought he was as upset as I was for not being told,” he said.
Mr. Rizzo said that White House officials agreed with him that destroying the tapes was a bad idea, and that they expected to be informed before the C.I.A. made any decisions about their fate.
“They said don’t do anything without telling them in advance,” he said.
One American official familiar with the matter cautioned that the e-mail messages were merely the account of one unnamed C.I.A. official, not the results of a formal investigation.
“It’s a little risky to draw cosmic conclusions from something like that,” he said.
The destruction of the interrogation tapes was first revealed by The New York Times in December 2007.